A virtual museum runs 570 operating systems in your browser
The Virtual OS Museum, created by Andrew Warkentin, showcases 570 operating systems that can be run directly in a web browser. This extensive collection spans from the first stored-program computer in 1948 to early versions of modern operating systems. The project emphasizes the importance of software preservation and the challenges associated with running older operating systems on contemporary hardware.
- ▪The museum features 570 operating systems running on QEMU, VirtualBox, or UTM.
- ▪It includes a catalog of 1,700 installs across 250 platforms, starting from 1948.
- ▪Andrew Warkentin argues that software preservation has improved since 2003, but challenges remain for running older OSes.
2 outlets in our directory ran this story, first to last over 33 hours. All of the coverage we found sits in one bucket: centre. That one-sidedness is itself worth noticing.
- ▪ I've built a virtual museum with nearly every operating system you can think of — The Virtual OS Museum
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Record
| Original publisher | Boing Boing |
| Canonical URL | https://boingboing.net/2026/05/20/a-virtual-museum-runs-570-operating-systems-in-your-browser.html |
| Publication time | Thu, 21 May 2026 00:34:45 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-21T00:45:03.143Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-21T00:45:03.143Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | XyCwKSsWCx0I · 2 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
A virtual museum runs 570 operating systems in your browser Ellsworth Toohey 5:34 pm Wed May 20, 2026 Andrew Warkentin has spent over twenty years collecting old operating systems and getting them to run. The result is the Virtual OS Museum, a launcher and Linux VM that boots 570-odd operating systems on top of QEMU, VirtualBox, or UTM, with everything pre-installed, pre-configured, and rolled back to a known-good state by a snapshot tool when an install breaks. The catalog covers 1,700 installs across 250 platforms. It starts in 1948 with the Manchester Baby, the machine generally credited as the first stored-program computer, and ends with early Longhorn betas and Mac OS X 10.5 on PowerPC.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Boing Boing.
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